The present invention concerns the apparatus involved in playing the sport of paintball warfare and discloses a loading stand that facilitates the loading of paintballs into a paintball container tube which in turn is then used to load paintball gun magazines.
The sport of paintball warfare has become a popular pastime and a military training exercise. The sport employs the use of hand held paintball air compression guns which shoot out small approximately .68 caliber diameter paintballs. These paintballs are semi-hard, hollow, plastic balls containing various colored dyes, which leave a colored mark on the objects they strike. These paintballs are contained in paintball ammunition magazines that are attached to and feed these paintballs into the guns. These magazines must be reloaded or refilled from time to time from paintball container tubes, xe2x80x9ctubesxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9ctubexe2x80x9d for short, which are carried into the playing area. These tubes themselves must be reloaded from bulk paintball stock supplies by pouring these paintballs into the tubes or by hand delivering the paintballs to the tubes. At the present time, the procedure for reloading the tubes has proven to be an awkward process often leading to the destruction, damaging or soiling of the paintballs being transferred to the tubes, thus rendering the paintballs too defective for use in the guns. Various haphazard methods have been applied to overcome this problem, but none has proven to be sufficiently effective or easy to use in order to meet with wide acceptance.
The invention described here provides a solution to the problems met in reloading these tubes with paintballs by disclosing a practical, inexpensive, portable, easy to use loading stand apparatus to facilitate the rapid reloading of these tubes. This apparatus comprises a stand which supports two parallel, horizontal shelves, separated by a few inches. These shelves are provided with circular vertically aligned apertures into which the tubes to be loaded are inserted and held steady in fixed, vertical positions, the top of each of the tubes being essentially flush with the top surface of the top shelf. Attached to the top shelf, by a pivoting hinge, is a wide mouthed hopper, open at the top and bottom. When this hopper has been rotated over and onto the top shelf, the paintballs can be poured into the hopper which funnels these paintballs into the top open ends of the tubes until they are full. To remove the loaded tubes, the hopper is rotated off the top shelf freeing the tubes.
It is thus an object of this invention to provide a container tube support means to facilitate the loading of paintballs into a container tube.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a container tube support means for loading paintballs into a container tube which is easy to use, reliable and portable.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a loading stand for loading paintballs into a container tube which is inexpensive to manufacture.
These and other objects will be apparent to those skilled in the art.